Perhaps it's not surprising that when a couple of Virginia transplants move into a SoHo loft, more than a touch of gentility comes along as well

At Home in SoHo

At Home in SoHo

Seven years ago, when Christopher Daniels moved from Charlottesville, Virginia, to New York City to live an artist's life, he telephoned Alice Childress, the only person in the city he knew from his hometown.

Childress, who is now Vice President, Advertising and Creative Services at Vera Wang, had moved to Manhattan a year before. The two had gone to the same high school for a couple of years, and, even though the budding artist remembered that the fashionable young woman with the silky cascade of hair had "never given me the time of day," he figured it would be nice to be in touch with someone who shared his genteel Southern upbringing. It didn't take long for them to realize they were perfect for each other.

In 2011, after several years of living together in an Upper East Side "classic six," they married and purchased a 1,500-square-foot loft in SoHo. With the help of Daniels's sister, Courtnay Daniels Haden (415-269-0737), a San Francisco-based interior designer, they've brought a bit of uptown style with them.

"It might be hard to believe, but working with family was wonderful," says Haden. Her brother and his wife "have a fantastic eye," she adds. "Although they're young, they have really sophisticated ideas. They wanted something that would endure."

Living Room

Living Room

The square loft with high ceilings could easily have lent itself to the white, minimal treatment, or been turned into a trendy, candy-color fantasia. Instead, after undergoing a radical gut renovation, the apartment has become an elegantly muted formal space with fine old furniture and a dollop of Southern whimsy−a slightly eccentric Park Avenue aerie transported to the epicenter of Manhattan's sleek downtown.

"New York can be overstimulating," says Childress−now Alice Daniels. "Sometimes you just need to escape." Christopher, whose minutely observed representational canvases have strong political content, said he was wholly onboard; he wanted a civilized oasis far from the intense, cluttered atmosphere of his studio in gritty Long Island City, over the bridge in Queens. "My studio is strewn with thousands of crayons, with my work everywhere," he says. "I wanted to come home to the opposite of that."

They began with the carpet, says Alice, gesturing at the Oriental in one of the apartment's two seating areas. No one seems to know its provenance, but it once belonged to her mother.

In the living room, the painted sofa and wing chair are 19th century, the side chair is 18th century, the linen-upholstered sofa is by Lee Industries, and the cocktail table is by Jacques Adnet; both the 18th-century Italian side table and the antique rug, which is layered over a jute rug from Stark, were gifts from family, and the beadboard ceiling is painted in Farrow & Ball's Strong White.